


House of ghosts

by themegalosaurus



Series: SPN episode codas [25]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Depression, Episode: s13e05 Advanced Thanatology, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Season/Series 13
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-16
Updated: 2017-11-16
Packaged: 2019-09-06 18:02:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16837636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themegalosaurus/pseuds/themegalosaurus
Summary: Tag to 13x05. If Dean dies, where does that leave Sam?





	House of ghosts

“Three minutes,” Dean says, and jabs the thing into his heart, slumps down dead in that house full of ghosts.

“Dean!” says Sam, “Hey!” And then, under his breath, “Fuck you.” The house creaks. His hand trembles as he pours out salt, a narrow line around Dean’s body and no room for himself. “Fuck you.”

Three minutes by Sam’s phone, and he picks up the second syringe, balances it in his palm a second before he drives the needle into Dean’s chest.

Nothing.

Nothing, and Sam’s veins wash through with an icy mixture of terror, fury, regret. If Dean goes out this way, out to the Empty which there’s no coming back from, into the clutches of whatever now passes for death–

“Keep the faith for both of us,” he’d said to Sam, and here’s Sam trying to do that, drawing himself together, leafing through the playbook of Making Things Nice for Dean. Maybe it’s worn a little thin. He doesn’t know half the time how much Dean’s just playing along, the pie performatively shovelled down and the girls half-assedly groped. It’s what Sam’s got, so he offers it. It’s what Dean was asking for, when he told Sam to hold on. So Sam did it, played the game, went to the goddamn strip club and sat there sober so he could drive Dean home; bought beer for breakfast for the functioning alcoholic. He did it, and Dean’s killed himself anyway, and what does that mean for Sam?

Sam loves what he does. He’s certainly said that. Even if he doesn’t love it, he’s okay with it now, in a way that he hasn’t been always. This is the choice he’s made - the series of choices - and that’s alright. It is. He can find a purpose in it. But it’s Dean’s life, really. Sam and Dean against the world: that’s Dean’s dream, not Sam’s. And if Dean disappears from it, the whole thing stops making sense.

A couple deaths back - not the last time, when Mom came back, too - not the time that Dean died and woke up again, black-eyed - but the time before that, maybe, when Dean exploded in Leviathan goo - that’s exactly how it had felt. Sam, stranded suddenly in a family business without the family, wheeling disoriented and struggling to recognise a selfhood misshapen by the weight of his obligations. It had been a slow climb back out of that pit, into a funny, spiky future with a woman and a dog and a house. It had been terrifying, at first, building a life without reference to Dean; terrifying and then giddily liberating, even through the fog of his grief.

When Dean came back Sam had been physically sick with the shock of it, faint both with joy and with straining to breathe through the familiar, stifling guilt. Four years later and he can hardly remember the self who’d been filling out college applications. What an idiot. What a jerk.

He doesn’t think about missed opportunities. He doesn’t. It doesn’t help. It doesn’t help when Eileen dies and the faint, tentative visions of some possible future evaporate, quick-snap. It doesn’t help when he notices a Stanford classmate in the news, talking big about his new law-firm job and his wife and his kids. It doesn’t help when he’s in bed with a woman, relaxed and unfettered with his wine glass in hand, and the whole thing evaporates to leave him chained to a chair, charred and humiliated, his insides naked and exposed. Dean soaks himself in regret. Sam tries his best to let things go.

He tries his best, but Dean’s on the floor, cold, and Sam can feel himself slipping.

“Wake up,” he says. “Wake up, you fucker.” He slaps Dean’s face, half-hearted. What’s the point? They’ll be here again anyway, in three years, five years, ten. Too late, that’s when they’ll be here. Sam can’t keep starting again.

“Wake UP,” he says, and punches his hand into his brother’s chest. Dean gasps then, a long, shuddering sound. He coughs.

“You’re okay,” Sam says, lead weight in his stomach. “You’re okay.”


End file.
